1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for recognizing an image, and more particularly to an apparatus and a method for recognizing a specific subject from a still image or a moving image at a high speed.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to recognize a specific subject from an image, a device for recognizing an image must receive learning data for the image and information about candidate areas used for distinguishing the specific object from other objects in the image. At this time, the use of both subject information and pixel information about the candidate area requires a great amount of time and computing power.
For this reason, the conventional technique uses either feature information or edge information about a concerned area used for determining a certain subject instead of inputting all pieces of information about the concerned area, thereby reducing the amount of information required for image recognition. Thus, various schemes for reducing the amount of information may exist according to schemes of extracting feature information. However, the schemes for reducing the amount of information determine a subject using either feature information or an intrinsic vector and an intrinsic value extracted from an edge image. In the conventional technique, even when the minimum size of a candidate area used for determining a subject is, for example, 64×64 pixels, the number of the pixels is 4096. The 4096 pixels become 20480 dimensions when they are multiplied by the dimensions of x and y coordinates and RGB. If a candidate area having an amount of information larger than an amount of information of 64×64 pixels is employed, the dimension of input information may be within the range of several hundreds of thousands to several millions.
This great amount of information degrades the performance of a device for recognizing an image and requires a great amount of initial learning time. In addition, an image having this great amount of information is not suitable for both a portable terminal having little computing power and a server environment over a network.
A variety of typical schemes for finding an edge image used for reducing the amount of information required for recognizing an image only extract more detailed edge information, but actually do not reduce an amount of input information.